A disruption at one of Amazon's datacenters has led to service disruptions in the company's EC2 or Elastic Cloud computing service. The outage, which started at Starting at 1:41 a.m. PDT, in turn brought down major websites such as Reddit and Foursquare.

Amazon's EC2 service allows business to rent processing time on Amazon's computers, which is useful for sites that need a lot of processing power. The disruption seriously affected sites that are constantly working through a lot of data. Dynamic sites like Hootsuite and Quora that are constantly processing new data are down completely. Other sites remain up but are still affected; Reddit, for instance, is operating in read-only mode as it cannot process new stories or votes.

Amazon hasn't responded to our requests for more information but the company's status dashboard has provided periodic updates throughout the morning. As of 10:50 a.m. PDT, the service disruptions are continuing and there is not yet an estimate for when service will be restored. An update provided to NetworkWorld at 8:54 AM PDT states that the issue had to do with a re-mirroring of EBS volumes at the datacenter.

Amazon is now working to combat the issue and says it is "...starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them."